Genealogy News Corral Catch-up

Genealogy News Corral Catch-up

Happy 2012 to you! It was a nice holiday lull, but now it's time to ease back into the swing of things. Here's a roundup of some genealogy headlines to get things started:PBS' Winter-Spring 2012 lineup includes a 10-episode celebrity genealogy series called "Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates...

Happy 2012 to you! It was a nice holiday lull, but now it’s time to ease back into the swing of things. Here’s a roundup of some genealogy headlines to get things started:

Gates will delve into the genealogy and genetics of famous Americans including Kevin Bacon, Robert Downey, Jr., Branford Marsalis, John Legend, Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and Rick Warren. The show’s website is here, though is hasn’t yet been fleshed out with any content.

A few updates to the genealogy web search engine Mocavo.com: You can now upload files to your account using Dropbox; just follow these instructions on the Mocavo.com blog. Also, if you log in before you search, you can mark off Mocavo.com search results you’ve already looked at with an “I’ve Read This” button, and you can rank matches as The Person Im Looking For,” Maybe A Good Match,” Not Who Im Looking For and Broken Link.

Finally, the site has introduced Mocavo Plus, an advanced version the site’s developer says will get you more-relevant matches with features such as wild card searching, date-range searching, GeoSearching (in the US) and more. Subscriptions cost $9.95 per month or $79.95 (a sale price) per year.

The National Archives and Records Administration has launched “Know Your Records” online videos from the popular genealogy how-to workshops hosted at its facilities on topics such as such as census, immigration and military records. Catch the videos on the archives’ YouTube channel.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) announced its schedule of upcoming workshops at its Boston research library. If you’ll be in the area, you can learn about the library’s resources, local history, researching African-American ancestors and more (NEHGS also is organizing a research trip to Belfast in May). Check out the schedule on the AmericanAncestors.org website.

Genetic testing site 23andme, which provides test-takers with medical- and ancestry-related analyses, has generated some controversy in changing site policies. Now, those who let their 12-month subscriptions lapse will lose access to their Relative Finder matches, Health Reports and other features that rely on their genetic data. They’ll still have access to the raw data. Read more about the controversy on the Your Genetic Genealogist blog.